A better review at luminous landscape is completely irrelevant as long as quality control is that bad with SONY and decentering defects remain as common among SONY lenses as they are now.

But SONY is not alone to blame. I have had an awful decentered Panasonic G Vario 14-45 O.I.S. which I exchanged for an Olympus M.Zuiko 12-50 that turned out to be as badly centered as the former one. Having dumped my mFT gear, I am now lucky with my NEX 5R and the SIGMA EX DN 19/2.8 and 30/2.8. I will never buy zooms again, which in general are not more prone to decentering effects than fixed focal lenses, but if a zoom is decentered, it can show varying decentering behaviour at different focal lengths.

Zooms generally have more elements that fixed focal length lenses, so there is more chance of one or more being decentred.

It is much easier to find out if a fixed focal lens is decentered or not. And I will refrain from buying optical stabilized lenses, as optical stabilization is "decentering by design".

Well, there are times when the blur from camera shake is worse than the blur from the lens. OS can be truly useful at times, even if a stabilised lens will not give ultimate quality.

Back on topic: I made my first experience with SONY with an SLT Alpha 33. The kit lens was decentered to such a degree that I managed to get a picture which showed two trees, one at the left, the other on the right side of the image. The left tree was about three meters afar, while the distance to the right one was about 30 meters. Despite the fact that I used a normal aperture such as f/5.6, both trees were completely in focus! It was unbelievable: The focal plane of the lens was that aslant! After that experience I was completely fed up with SONY and tried my luck with other brands.

By the way: I had several AF-S Nikkor lenses by Nikon and several EF(-S) lenses by Canon during the last five years. None of these were decentered. SONY has a serious problem here.

I think there is a market for some good automatic test gear, if some clever optical company was to produce it. Topcon ? Zeiss ? Sigma ?